The proliferation of memes is one of the best consequences of the Internet.
Broadly speaking a meme is an idea, typically represented as an image or video, that a group of people gets behind. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, but before the Internet memes weren't popular. The Internet makes it easy for anyone to create, share, and support memes.
Here's some of my favorites:
Up until now, memes have emerged on the Internet organically and there's generally no economic incentives associated with them. But what if memes were tokenized so that an early supporter of a meme could own a stake in it and benefit financially from it?
Tokenizing memes has the potential to dramatically increase creativity in the world by embedding financial incentives in the creation of new ideas. There's a lot of work to be done to create a protocol that enables this, to be sure. And many hard questions must be answered, like how to uniquely verify ownership of a meme. But I think this is an underhyped area of blockchains right now that deserves more attention.
